Blazers SF's: The rich get... homeless

   Just a few short months ago the question being asked about the Blazers small forwards was "wow with so much talent how will we possibly find minutes for all of them?" A short while and a couple drastic injuries has turned that quesion to "Who can we get to fill in for this role?" First Batum went down with the torn labrum, out for most of the season. This left us with no more logjam, but still decent players to play that position. Then Outlaw suffered a similar fate with a stress fracture, also out for most of the season. The Outlaw injury is in my opinion the worst event the Blazers have suffered this season.

   I know there are a lot of Travis haters on this site, but I personally have never been one of them. Some people even posted about how it may be a good thing that he got injured, so we can see what he brought to the team. I admit that last season he had some weaknesses, namely defense and rebounding. This season, however, he came into the season saying he was more focused on defense and rebounding and it showed. I thought that there could be no possible way that losing a 6'9", super athletic, extremely long player who can score on anybody in the league and shoots 3's at a high percentage could be a good thing. Especially since I saw multiple times during this season where he passed up some of his trademark long twos and tried to get a few steps closer before he shot the ball. Now with Travis out, as well as his nearly 10 points and 3.5 rebounds per game, the blazers powerful offense seems stagnant. He is a player who other teams always had to worry about because on any night he could go off and torch them.

   The Blazers are starting a 6'7" small forward who is coming off an entire season of not playing. Also used in this role are a 6'6" Brandon Roy and a 6'6" Rudy Fernandez. This leaves our team undersized at the small forward position against most teams and struggling to find a way to cope. The players we lost were a 6'8" Batum, and 6'9" Outlaw who are both incredibly long so the biggest thing we have lost is size and depth. I think we should give Dante Cunningham a shot at Small Forward. He has the size we need since he is 6'8" and 230 pounds. He is strong, fast, and athletic so he could keep up on defense with most SF's. He is a scrapper so he will help with the intensity we have been lacking and perform a lot of intangibles, such as Offensive boards and steals. He can even throw in a few points in the flow of the offense. He is not a tremendous scoring threat but if he was on the floor as a role player with Roy, LA, and Oden I think he would be very effective. This may not be what we were hoping to be faced with before the season started but you have to adapt to your situation and since we have 2 back up PF's but no backup SF I think this would at least be worth a try.

   So I have a couple of questions for you B-Edgers. The first of which is do you, especially the Travis haters, miss Travis Outlaw and what he brought to the team yet? Do you think that our current struggles have to do with our losses at the Small Forward position and do you think if Travis was still healthy we would be experiencing less difficulties right now? And lastly what do you think we should do to fill this void? whether it be Dante, playing Rudy or BRoy more, or trading for somebody to fill this position.